My neighbor asked me for advice on setting up wi-fi in his new house. I realized it’s been a while since I’ve written about wi-fi, and it’s never been cheaper or easier to blanket your house and yard with a good signal. Blanketing your house and yard while remaining secure, though, is still important.

A good way to eliminate dead zones in your house where wifi doesn’t work is to add one or two wireless access points to your setup. Access points, thankfully, are no longer stupid expensive–they used to cost twice as much as a router in spite of being nothing more than a cut-down router–but almost every […]

Earlier this year at CES, HP introduced its HP Stream Mini ($180) and Pavilion Mini ($320 and $450) mini-desktops. They’re small, inexpensive, and in the case of the Stream, silent. They turn out to be surprisingly upgradeable as well. Ars Technica has details and benchmarks, but of course I have my own priorities based on […]

If you’ve been procrastinating about deploying 450-megabit (802.11n) wi-fi to your house, I have a reason for you to procrastinate a while longer: Gigabit wireless (802.11ac). It’s only about twice as fast as its predecessor, which pales next to the 8x improvement 802.11n provided over 802.11g, but if you’re wanting to stream HD media through […]

A 7-inch, underpowered Android tablet that may or may not be available at your corner Walgreen Drug Store is made some big waves today. It’s underpowered, but it’s supposedly on sale for 99 bucks. Regular retail price is $129. Yes, for 99 bucks, it’s a toy. But it could be a fun toy.

It’s not enough to know what to look for in a router. I wanted to get some solid advice on wi-fi network security. Who better to give that advice than someone who built an airplane that hacks wi-fi? So I talked to WhiteQueen at http://rabbit-hole.org, the co-builder of a wi-fi hacking airplane that made waves […]

What to look for in a router is a common question, and an important one. I’m glad to see people are taking security seriously. I visited that topic in 2004, but that was a long, long time ago. Things have changed somewhat in those six long years. Of course, any router is better than having […]

I upgraded a Compaq Evo D51S today. This was also sold under the name D510, and may have also been sold under the HP or Hewlett Packard brand. It was intended to be a low-profile, relatively affordable business computer.

Upgrading it poses some challenges, but there are some things you can do with it.